Feature:Host Multiple Domains

From HostingWiki

Most hosting plans allow for multiple domains to be hosted on just one single account. And for many hosting providers, the number of domains allowed is a selling point of different plans. For example, the "Hostgator Hatchling Plan" can only host one domain, but the "Hostgator Baby Plan" can host unlimited domains.

Different Control Panels achieve multiple domain hosting using different method. In most control panels, it is achieved through the "Addon domains".

Many hosting plans claim their plan allows unlimited domain hosting. And they may also ensure you with unlimited subdomain, unlimited parked domain, unlimited bandwidth, and etc.. It looks like good, really attractive, isn't it? But before you pay, you must know more behind it.

First, we must know that there is limitation. Take the most-used cPanel as an example, cPanel itself only support maximal 1000 domains per account. So even if what you buy is UNLIMITED plan, when you login to your cPanel account, you will find out what's showing on the left panel is something like "Addon Domains 3/999". It means you can add 999 addon domains at most. Plus the primary domain, you can host 1000 domains on this account.

So, for hosting plans that use cPanel, UNLIMITED domains may mean 1000 domains.

Second, even if the provider allows 1000 domains, you may not want to host so many on your account. Why? Because every site consumes server resources (e.g. CPU/RAM). Hosting providers have set CPU/RAM limits for every account, and for shared hosting, this limit is quite low. If your sites keep on hitting these usage limits, you will receive warning from the hosting provider. Another example, let's say the CPU limit on some shared plan is "20% 10 seconds", if the sites on your account were consuming 24% CPU for more than 10 seconds, you are likely to receive an email from the administrator which said "Your site consumes too much resources, you may want to upgrade to our VPS plan. :)".

Then, how many domains/sites you would like to host on one shared account? It highly depends on the site type and scale. If those sites are very small (e.g. several pages) or most are static pages, you can host as many as hundreds. But for typical dynamic PHP sites with databases, you may really don't want to host more than 10 on one account.

cPanel

The Addon domains feature allows you run serveral websites from a single account.

The main difference between Addon domains and Parked domains is that these don't have to be pointed at the root of the domain.

You can have a domain called example.com and then point domains at folders with in the account.

e.g. example.com could be pointed at hostingmatrix.org/example/

Any one who enters example.com into a browser will never know it is being hosted within another account, it will appear as it has its own web hosting account.